His idea is deceptively simple. Hello Health gives you all the online connection to your doctor you could ever want.

But you pay for that, about $35 per month. And if you actually need to see the doctor, you pay more, $100 for a basic visit, twice that if you need serious time. And no, it's not covered by insurance. It's a version of "concierge medicine," where the doctor is paid to keep you well, not just treat you when you're sick.

As Parkinson told the Boston Globe recently, “No more frantic Googling, no more whole days away from work, no more long waits, and no more unnecessary Emergency Room visits, or scary receptionists.’’

Maybe. Personally I have more faith in Google to make available the health information I need than in the ability of Parkinson or his fellow physicians to aggregate it.

But his concepts are true innovation, not just technologically but in terms of the business model. And they are in line with what reformers call the "medical home" concept, in which technology is used to improve the productivity of both doctors and nurses and patients are in charge of their own care.

Encouraging this innovation is what America is all about, I would argue. Let's see what our entrepreneurs can do with a streamlined payment system before we toss that opportunity away and hand the money to government.

That's what I would say if I were against single payer, anyway. Pity health reform opponents have so little imagination, or faith in entrepreneurship.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.
DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.
My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.